Petition For a Transparent Digg

After reading the comments from Neil’s post on burying within Digg it seems that many of you are in favor of Digg opening up their bury data and making it transparent. In fact it seems to me that even those who didn’t like the post may be in favor of this because some truly believe the burying is legit – and this would prove it one way or the other once and for all.Two examples come to mind of stories we’ve done recently that have been buried on Digg while stories of almost the exact same nature were submitted to Digg later and made the frontpage.The first is the one Neil mentioned, our post on iminlikewithyou which was published on May 7th and submitted to Digg later that day. It started out strong, but then was buried with 31 diggs. Meanwhile two days ago, similar (though much less comprehensive) coverage of iminlikewithyou made the frontpage with ease collecting 161 votes. Additionally, when our coverage of the Facebook Marketplace was submitted to Digg, it was promptly buried. But a few days ago a less comprehensive version of what is basically the same story was submitted to Digg and hit the frontpage with 399 diggs.So as you can see with these two examples, it’s not like the stories being buried are of no interest to the community – very similar ones submitted days later made the frontpage with ease! Chris at TechSpews went ahead and created an online petition in the hope that just as with the HD-DVD situation, Digg will listen to the users. If you are in favor of Digg showing the bury data just as it shows the digg data, please head over and sign the petition.Despite Neil’s post getting huge traffic, being the lead for a while on TechMeme, and getting 125 diggs while remaining buried, Digg has yet to respond to any of the allegations brought forth. Instead they announced a new visualization tool.Find the petition here.

4 thoughts on “Petition For a Transparent Digg”

A fair point Huphtur, but it also kind of makes our point. If some user is consistently burying another user’s diggs that seems very suspicious. Remember, there is a difference between not digging something and burying it.Now if that submitter is submitting spam that is one thing and they’d have no legitimate reason to have negative feelings towards the user burying them – they’d know they were doing something they shouldn’t be. But submitting legitimate posts and having them buried over and over again by the same user doesn’t seem right.

There shouldn’t be automatic removal of stories. If enough people like a story it should go on the front page, even if lots of other people don’t like it. Anything really bad should be reportable, but removed manually.Plus it shouldn’t be “news” it should be “items”Perhaps the demand is there for a new digg…